they stop whatever they’re doing, their eyes fill with tears, and they find themselves unable to go on until they have shaken off the dark thought or suppressed the memory. Believe me, in the long term, and in the medium term too, everyone ends up shaking off the dead, because that is their final fate, as they would doubtless agree, and, once they have tried and experienced their new condition, they wouldn’t be prepared to come back anyway. No one who has departed this life and washed his hands of it, even if his death occurred against his will and much to his regret, as the victim, say, of a murder, no one would choose to be reinstated and thus resume the terrible fatigue of existing. Think about it, Colonel Chabert endured unspeakable suffering and saw what we all believe to be the worst of horrors, namely war; you would think that no one could give lessons in horror to someone who had taken part in pitiless battles fought in sub-zero temperatures, as happened in Eylau, and that was not his first battle, but the last; there, two armies of seventy-five thousand men confronted each other; we don’t know exactly how many died, but they say there were at least forty thousand, and that they fought for fourteen hours or more to achieve very little: the French took possession of the field, a field that was nothing but a vast snowy waste piled with corpses, and although the Russian army was badly battered when it retreated, it was not destroyed. The French were so debilitated and exhausted and so stiff with cold, that it was four hours, when night had already fallen, before they realized that the enemy was silently slipping away. Not they would have been in any condition to pursue them. It’s said that the following morning, Marshal Ney rode round the battlefield and that his only comment reflected a mixture of horror, disgust and disapproval: “What slaughter! And for what?” And yet, despite all this, it is not the soldier, it is not Chabert, but the lawyer, Derville, who has never seen a cavalry charge or a bayonet wound or the havoc caused by cannon fire, who has spent his life either in his chambers or in court, safe from physical violence, barely leaving Paris, he is the one who, at the end of the novel, is allowed to speak and enlighten us about the horrors he has seen during his entirely non-military career, not at war but at peace, not at the front line but in the rearguard. He says to his former clerk, Godeschal, who is about to take his first case as a lawyer: “You know, my dear friend, there are three men in modern society who can never think well of the world: the Priest, the Doctor, and the Man of Law. They all wear black robes, worn perhaps in mourning for lost virtues and lost hopes. The unhappiest of these three is the lawyer.” He explains that when a man goes to a priest, he does so prompted by feelings of remorse and repentance, by beliefs that make him more interesting, which elevate him, and that, in a way, are a comfort to the soul of his intercessor. “But we lawyers”’ – and here Díaz-Varela read in Spanish from the final page of the book, presumably translating as he went, because he was hardly likely to have made a version beforehand – ‘“we see the same wicked feelings repeated over and over, and nothing can correct them, our offices are sewers that can never be washed clean. I cannot begin to tell you the things I have seen in the exercise of my profession! I have seen a father left to die in a garret, without a penny to his name, abandoned by two daughters to whom he had given forty thousand pounds a year! I’ve seen wills burned; I’ve seen mothers rob their children, husbands rob their wives, wives kill their husbands or else use their husbands’ love to drive them into madness or imbecility, in order that they might live contentedly with their lover. I have seen women administer lethal drops to a legitimate child born of the marriage bed in order to bring about its death and thus benefit a love-child. I can’t tell you everything I’ve seen, because I have been privy to crimes against which justice is impotent. All the horrors that novelists think they invent are